Incomprehensibility and Condemnation: Six Characters

Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is difficult to comprehend. It challenges us readers to reassess our preconceived notion of what a play should be like: well-behaved, predictable, passive; a mere collection of words on the written page. The play has none of these qualities; instead it wrestles violently with our imagination and refuses to surrender the one-dimensionality of its artifice by forcing upon us the absurdity of its revolutionary notion. And what is this notion? That Art – unchanging, fixed, its fate already determined like the eponymous Six Characters of the play – is infinitely more real than “Reality” itself, whose evanescent, transitory nature renders it ultimately illusory through the callous passage of time. In a memorable scene near the end of the play, the Father, effectively serving as the mouthpiece of the modernist sensibility, condemns the Manager and the Actors for the frivolity, the nihilistic uncertainty of their existence, unlike the Characters whose lives – whose purpose – has already been preordained.

We as audience and observer are not spared this condemnation. Flirting with the basic oppositions of reality and illusion Six Characters manages to prove unequivocally the superiority of its reality by conversely questioning our own. Through an elaborate mise-en-abime structure the play seamlessly weaves through various ontological levels, blurring the distinction of roles between actor, character, writer and observer. We encounter this breaking of the “fourth wall” in several instances of the play: the Actors become part of the audience (and share our ontological level) when they bear witness to the drama of the Characters unfolding before their – our eyes; characters regularly “invade” the audience’s space by emerging from side doors or walking down the aisles (now a commonplace gimmick in Ateneo productions). The entire play has the bare, gritty feel of an improvisation skit, as the very first scene demonstrates by letting us “chance upon” the rehearsal of another play by Pirandello. Our confusion and displacement are heightened because we are not used to being exposed to the inner workings of the theater – it is as if our skin were violently ripped apart, revealing all the goriness of our entrails for the world to see (as when Yossarian reveals Snowden’s secret in Catch 22). The discomfort we feel only proves the frailty, the utter instability of the reality which we as audience inhabit, concealed only by the length of a velvet curtain across the stage, or a few inches of skin.

This leads us to Pirandello’s final condemnation in Six Characters: that of the traditional belief that art should exist merely to imitate life. Pirandello shamelessly flouts theater’s established conventions in an attempt to question its very limitations. He explored how drama could serve to critique itself by exposing and mocking its constraints as well as its practitioners’ naïve belief that they can faithfully represent reality as it is. He has the Father regularly ridicule the Actors for attempting to bring fictional situations to life; he sees their profession as a joke, their quest for verisimilitude “madness”. His Characters are mortified when the Manager attempts to make stylistic alterations to their story; the Actors, in turn, are frustrated when Madame Pace and the Step-Daughter converse in hushed tones as they would “in real life”, instead of projecting their voices as they should have done on the stage. Clearly, Pirandello is pointing out that a conflict of interest has ensued – between authors, who try to preserve the fidelity of their art, and producers, who try to make a profit from the play’s performance. This raises the question of whether the play as an art form has already been tainted by commercialism – everything now hinges upon whether the audience is entertained, and not on whether the play’s implications are understood, by either the performers or the audience. These concerns, unique to the theater, are nevertheless representative of modernists from all genres’ growing disenchantment with reality, and Pirandello effectively foregrounds all these frustrations in his play. What is Art’s purpose, then, if not to imitate Life? Simple, the modernists respond: Art should be done for Art’s sake, self-sufficient, cocky, most of the time incomprehensible. Just like Six Characters in Search of an Author.